Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability

1. Globalizing Cyberspace: Vision and Reality

GlobalizingCyberspace: Vision and Reality The Palacio de Justiciain the Mexican city of Morelia offers its visitors conflicting cultural messages: while the Spanish colonial architecture communicates a sense of permanence to the graceful stone arches and inner courtyard, and a huge mural depicting the heroes of Mexican independence dominates the central staircase, across the Calle de Allende toward the entrance to the palace one sees banners protesting the 1995 government decisions leading to the loss of ancestral lands, and sleeping cots under the7 archway where a small group of Indians are in their thirtieth day of a hunger strike. The well-dressed bureaucrats and citizens make their wayinto the inner courtyard without acknowledging the demonstration, while the lone police officer walking through the craft vendors' corridor gives no hint of recognition. Similar examples of contrast can be found in nearly every region of the world: Central and South America, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, and North America.With the world spopulation increasing to over six billion since 1900 and projected to reach eight billion before stabilizing in 2030, the major challenge facing humanity will be to provide for our basic needs of food, shelter, and meaningful employment. The rapid decline in available fresh water, topsoil, forest cover, and plant and animal diversity further exacerbates our challenge. The millions of tons of toxic chemicals released into the environment, which are changing the basic chemistry of life itself, represent the less visible yet more potentially lethal and irreversible part of our dilemma of survival. 3 1 4 Cultural and Ecological Consequences Yet we never see the gravity of these realities presented in the mainstream media, nor in the popular magazines and books intended to shape our understanding of the new consumer-oriented and environmentally destructive civilization that will result from the computer revolution. Instead,weencounter in mass media aviewof technological progress as irreversible and universally benevolent. We read in magazines and see on television that the latest software, the newcomputer-based systems ofcommunication and marketing, and the myriad forms of interactive entertainment (a recent one being a program that allows young girls to dress Barbie in 150 different outfits) are contributing to the general improvement of our human situation. The level of technological euphoria and the authoritative tone with which each computer-based innovation is explained to us make criticism seem unwarranted and even subversive . (Witness the growing practice of derisively labeling computer critics asneo-Luddites.) Our inability to discuss seriously the deeper implications of the experimental cultural trajectorythat computers have put us on (a trajectory that began with the Industrial Revolution ) reflects our educational institutions' failure to provide the conceptual frameworks necessary for understanding technology as more than atool that enables us to achieve our goalsmore efficiently and as the latest expression of human evolution. We must ask important questions about whether computers will contribute to an ecologically sustainable and culturally diverse future . Such questions, however, are largely obscured by how proponents represent the benefits of this increasinglyubiquitous technology . Note the unqualified optimism in the following claims about the changes that computers will bring: By combining all information—numbers, texts, sound, and images—in digital form, and making it available everywhere,and making it infinitelymanipulable, the information highwaywill utterly change our lives (Ellison, 1994, p. 4). Globalizing Cyberspace 5 Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.... As we interconnect ourselves, many values of the nation state will give wayto those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role (Negroponte, 1995, pp. 6-7). VR [virtual reality] is an important threshold in the evolution of human-computer symbiosis.... In coming years, wewill be able to put on a headset, or walk into a media room, and surround ourselves in a responsive simulation of startling verisimilitude. Our most basic definitions of reality will be redefined in that act of perception (Rheingold, 1991, pp. 387-388). University presidents and classroom teachers make the same statements ofrelentless optimism, inevitability, and universality.The business community shares the euphoria about the latest stage in this supposedly evolutionary, competitive, life-forming process. Indeed , the shared optimism has led universities into collaboration with corporations through the establishment of virtual university degree programs and web sites for courses on many campuses across North America. Reflecting the re-emergence of Social Darwinist thinking among computer proponents, they show...